Argentina Charged with Reducing Jews to Second Class Citizens

The Financial Times of London, in a report from its Buenos Aires correspondent, asserts that “one of the many changes that took place when the military deposed President Arturo Illia on June 28 was the changing of the Argentinian Jew from a first class to a second class citizen.” The correspondent says that in the turmoil after the coup, the many Jewish names in top echelon Argentine Government posts have disappeared and no more than one or two have found their way onto the new lists of officials.

Citing the Catholic Church and the armed forces in Argentina as two spheres of “decision makers” in the country, the report points out that “the Jew obviously is no candidate for membership in the first and he has never been welcome in the second, except as a conscript.” The report also claims that the Argentine Jew “is constantly singled out most frequently on the completely unproved — indeed, absurd — assumption that the Jews are largely responsible for the supposed Communist threat to Argentina.

The article asserts that with perhaps the single exception of the Soviet Union, Argentina has been more associated with anti-Semitism than any other country in the world. ‘In recent years,” the report states, “as in the case of Russia, Argentina’s anti-Semitism is but the latest chapter of a historical process and is proving to be indeed a burden for a republic already beset by so many other problems.”

(A dispatch from Buenos Aires, published today in The New York Times, charged that Argentine policemen who raided faculty offices and classrooms in Argentinian universities recently were heard shouting anti-Semitic slogans and curses. The Government, according to the dispatch, is charged through its newly-published national universities law with seeking to force most Jewish professors out of the universities.)